WARREN ELLIS is a graphic novelist and author of the NYT best-selling novel GUN MACHINE. His graphic novel GLOBAL FREQUENCY is being developed for television by Jerry Bruckheimer and FOX. He is the writer of the graphic novel RED, adapted into the film starring Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren. His next book is NORMAL from FSG.

Things I’m Thinking About Today

Published October 24, 2009 by Warren Ellis

Some of these have been seen here before. I’m assembling, trying to get it all in front of me and see what it is. This is like the bit when Rolf Harris paints live on tv, and there’s just a bunch of random marks on the canvas, and he winks at the camera and says "Can you tell what it is yet?" And I can’t. But the marks — or, at least, the pre-treated canvas before I start making marks — are kind of interesting. There’s no process to the creative process. It’s just trying a bunch of stuff and doing anything that might work until you get where you want to be.

Anyway. Consider this your Weekend Web Zen or something.

The post-reality movement’s two signature artistic forms are the talking head video broadcast, and the op-ed. One wouldn’t think of these as being art works, as in carefully crafted fictions, but really, you have to see news in the post-reality movement’s view point. It isn’t about news, or facts, it is about how those facts are presented. Like a portrait, the idea is to flatter the consumer, not to present a realistic depiction. Real-esque is closer to the goal. If the patron looks at the portrait and likes what he or she sees, then the artist keeps getting to make more of them.

The recourse to History proposed by experts of postmodernity is a cheap trick that allows them to avoid the question of Time, the regime of trans-historical temporality derived from technological ecosystems. If in fact there is a crisis today, it is a crisis of ethical and esthetic references, the inability to come to terms with events in an environment where the appearances are against us. With the growing imbalance between direct and indirect information that comes of the development of various means of communication, and its tendency to privilege information mediated to the detriment of meaning, it seems that the reality effect replaces immediate reality.

— Paul Virilio

Amnesia is a critical part of our repertoire of distraction that enables us efficiently to recycle each mistake, each crime, each stupidity that we imagined was safely disposed of.